Bonjour!!
To say last month had been one of the hardest months of my life is an understatement. I have been pushed and stretched in ways I didn’t expect.
We arrived in Cote d’Ivoire on August 10th after two long flights totally over 20 hours, but we did fly Emirates both times which was amazing! I was also very encouraged getting to speak with a woman on our flight from Dubai to Accra who was a Christian and from Cote d’Ivoire. After our last flight in the country we waited for another 3 hours to get ready to be driven to our ministries. Our entire squad was taken to one of the pastors’ churches where we were served refreshments and greeted with smiles and friendly faces all around. After 3 days of travel, the five teams who were staying at the Mission Ephrata compound were shuttled there. We found out we had twin beds with mattresses and air conditioned rooms at night. Yay!!
On August 11th I woke up from a restful 9 hours of sleep excited for my first full day in the Ivory Coast. I got up took my malaria pill, when to breakfast and immediately felt nausea come over me. I quickly went inside and threw up my malaria pill. First lesson, don’t take malaria meds without having ate something first. Thankfully I felt almost instant relief and was able to have a pretty enjoyable day. Later in the day we were able to participate with handing out food to widows who had been bused in from the surrounding villages. Our pastor, Zacharie Adetola, helped lead a short prayer service and was able to tell these women about the healing power of Jesus. He then prayer over many of the women to receive healing and many proclaimed that they received it. Thank you Jesus!! We then helped pass out to each woman what I believe were 10lb bags of rice and some other information about the church. My absolute favorite part was at the end where we joined some of the ladies in dancing together. It was incredible seeing the joy on their faces as they danced in rhythm.
The next night we attended a prayer vigil from 9pm to 6am at the church on our compound. We prayed, sang, and worshiped together. By about 4am my eyes were having trouble staying open. Second lesson learned; don’t expect to always have a full nights sleep on the race. The following day we attended a young adult service at another church on God’s view of marriage. After the service we went to what became one of our favorite destinations of the month, the grocery store! This first time we went, we were able to get warm chocolate croissants from the bakery, we were in heaven. The French certainly know how to bake pastries. On Sunday, we learned we’d be attending two services each Sunday, 1st the youth service from 7am to 9am and then the regular service from 9am to 12pm. It was this first Sunday that we got to witness an Ivorian wedding. (See my last blog post to read about it.)
Monday rolled around and we had our first ministry opportunity evangelizing for 2 hours in the local neighborhood with the “youth” aka the young adults of the church. While I was nervous, I was excited to see what this looked like. While some of the youth knew some English, translating was out of the question. The woman and man I went with knew a few words in English, but not many. Most of the time I just prayed while they spoke to people we encountered on the street or in their homes. A couple times Valarie had me pray, but she wasn’t able to translate for me. I really had to learn to trust that the Holy Spirit would somehow convey what God was speaking through me to these people we encountered. It’s funny to think that many people also were excited to come to church just due to the fact our teams, people with a different skin color, would be there; God uses things we’d never think of to draw people to Him. As the month progressed we eventually did learn how to tell people “Jesus loves you” in French: Jésus t’aime.
Most of our days were very relaxed, but there were many times we were waiting to do an activity but were delayed. Another lesson learned: TIA “This is Africa.” Relationships matter much more to Africans than schedules or time restraints. This did allow me to start to get to know my teammates through working out, prayer walks, cleaning up trash around the compound, team time and laughing together. A week or so into the month we were asked by our pastor to help organize his library for the public to use and clean out the bookstore and inventory it. We organized and moved by our estimates, over 50k books. We also did have the opportunity to have some of our teams split up and go to a few different churches that our pastor had planted. At the church we attended I did get to sing and play “No Sweeter Name” on the piano. It was quite never racking as I hadn’t got to play or practice the entire month and the church was full! It was a wonderful opportunity to push more a little further out of my comfort zone. The blog photo is of this church during their time of prayer. Their love and reverence for the Lord was incredibly inspiring and beautiful.
The majority of the month consisted of evangelizing with the youth twice a week, attending church on Tuesday and Thursday nights and Sunday mornings, organizing and cleaning up the library, and loving on the people who lived at or near the church compound.
Some of the things we did with our free time: read a lot, grocery shopping for snacks ;), going to the mall for delicious ice cream, walking through the market, eating hamburgers and pizza, going to the zoo, watching a few movies huddled on a few twin beds, and lots of naps. Some of my highlights of the month included the smiles and waves from women and children as we said hello while walking to get taxis or vans to take us to town, having an elephant eat bread off our head, eating these fried doughnut balls as often as possible (not sure what they were called) and chocolate croissants, laughing with my team about Ed, and getting to worship and play piano with the squad at debrief.
I’ve already experienced so much change in my heart in such a short amount of time. Living in community is so new and so hard for me, but it’s worth it. I’m learning to let people truly love me for who I am, while I’m still asking the Lord to reveal the true me to myself and others. I believe this is one of the most important lessons God was revealing to me this month: it’s not about you. This experience, race and journey are part of His plan, not mine; I have to surrender all expectations to Him. Community forces you to learn to work with people who are vastly different than you, to sacrifice comforts for the sake of others, and to be vulnerable on a whole new level. I know this is just a drop in the bucket as to how God is going to use community to help grow me.
Though I hope to post more this month, know that God has been moving and working and transforming lives in and around us whether it’s on my team, my squad, our ministry hosts or those we encounter as we go about our day.
Please check out my teammates and squadmates blogs if you like to get some other perspectives.
I love you guys and am thankful for your prayer, encouragement and support!!
-Irene “Renie”
